Interlude: Memories of a poet
Shatby, Alexandria
January 1990
Sugar Mary sang at the Metropolitan on Thursday nights. The club was near the corniche and it drew tourists from the hotels and ships; they were the ones who filled the tables in front, listening under the bright lights to songs most of them didn’t understand. The other tables – the ones where the light was dimmer and the shadows were a veil – were where the city people sat. They were Arab, Greek, Armenian, Italian, all of Alexandria’s nations, and they all had different reasons for coming, but they all came because it was Mary’s night.
Costas sat near the wall, by the door that led downstairs to the kitchen, and nursed a bottle of ouzo while he listened. At the tables to either side, there was smoke and conversation, and the air was heavy with tobacco and kif; he was alone and said nothing. He had ears only for the song, and eyes only for the singer.
The set started with the Cairene and Stambouli ballads that were standard Alexandrine nightclub fare, mixed in with Roman love songs. Mary sang them well: her voice was deep and smoky as the air, the kind of voice that carried emotion as easily as a professor’s might carry erudition or an army officer’s might carry command. Some of the tourists sang with her, the ones who knew; others clapped their hands. Those at the back tables waited.
After thirty minutes, she dismissed her accompanists, and two men came on stage to replace them, one skilled on the oud and the other with a duduk. The music took on a new tone, a melancholy one, and Mary beat slowly on the hand-drums and sang in Armenian and Turkish. Now the conversation ceased in the dim corners of the club, stilled by laments that even the tourists could tell were ancient. Costas understood only a few of the words, but he didn’t need them to conjure scenes of doomed love and long-ago wars. Every nation had those stories.
Last of all, at the changing of the hour, Mary sang in Greek. For this, she had no accompanists at all, but if the tourists were expecting traditional songs, they were disappointed. Some of them were slow and others brisk and modern, but none had their origin in the tavernas of Athens or among the peasants of Arcadia. They were poetry, and they came from these very streets.
“This is called ‘1901,’” Mary said, and Costas put his drink down and leaned forward through the light of flickering candles. She sang slowly and sadly, and it was a song of a man’s love for another man and longing for his lover’s embrace. To sing of such things at all was daring in Alexandria, where everyone knew about them but kept them hidden, and for a woman to sing of them seemed more daring still. It was almost, Costas thought, that there was a different character to her voice now – or maybe it was just that he knew whose lyrics those were.
The song ended – everything must end – and its spell hung over the silence. Mary made her way offstage and out of the harsh light. She was overweight, Costas noticed for the first time, and she was somewhere on the far side of fifty. There was an empty table in the shadows and she retreated to it, disappearing as the patrons called for more drinks and the next singer came on.
Costas got up, leaving behind his half-finished bottle, and walked over to where she was. She was surrounded by admirers and well-wishers, but they dissipated after a time, and at last he stood alone with the palms of his hands on the tabletop.
“Ustaza Mariam?” he asked. “I hoped to meet you.”
She didn’t know him, but she thought that he was another admirer, and her smile was welcoming. “And you are?”
“Costas,” he said. “Costas… Kavafis.”
The smile vanished; the eyes grew stony. Mary rose from her chair, and she too left behind a half-empty bottle. “You’ve met me,” she said. “Now you can go to hell.”
Costas didn’t dare approach her the next Thursday, although he came to listen, and on the one after, he walked halfway but his courage failed him. It was the Thursday after
that – the last one in January, with leaden skies and a cold drizzle such as only happened in Alexandria in the winter – that he made it all the way.
Mary recognized him this time, and she signaled for the bouncer. “Wait,” he cried out. “I’m not the one who threw your mother out of the family. I wanted to meet you. Just that.”
She looked at his face closely, and her hand stopped in mid-movement. “You’re a child. Maybe you mean it,” she said. “Then sit.” She poured a glass of carob juice, pushed it in his direction, and gestured at a bottle. “That’s ‘Athyub vodka. To improve the kharoob.”
He poured some in, raised the glass timidly and drank, the earthiness of the Ethiopian spirit contrasting with that of the carob. Across the table, Mary put her own cup down and regarded him evenly.
“So tell me,” she said. “What does the family say about my mother now? What do they say about me?”
He looked embarrassed. “They don’t say anything. They don’t mention your name. I didn’t know who you were until I heard the lyrics to your songs.”
Mary laughed out loud, and there were ripples in the smoky haze. “So Constantine’s verses brought you to me? I weave them in with a few of my own… I’m only a poet in Greek, you know. When I try to write in Arabic or Armenian, I never can – I guess I’m part of the family at the end of the day, whatever they don’t say about me.” She took a deep drink from the vodka bottle, not bothering to mix it with kharoob this time. “So tell me, what do they say about
him?”
“That he was a great poet. Isn’t that what everyone says?”
“That’s not what
family should remember. But that’s what’s safe for them to say, I suppose. My mother only married an Armenian – they must have thought he was much worse.”
“I don’t know.” Costas listened for a moment to the singer on stage – an Italian, he had never liked Italian music – and searched his memory. “His mother and brothers loved him, they say, and he never caused a scandal, so no one else had to notice. But no one talks much about that. He’s a god in the family, and no one likes to think of gods as doing human things.” A question suddenly flashed through his mind. “Did your mother know him?”
Mary put the bottle down abruptly, and for a moment, Costas thought he’d angered her again. But when she stood over him, there was no menace. “Are you hungry?” she asked.
Hunger was the farthest thing from his mind. “I can’t say…”
“I am. You can follow me or not.”
He stood before he could make a conscious decision, and the two of them left the Metropolitan behind. The exit brought them to Shari al-Naby Daniel, in the Jewish quarter up the street from the synagogue: the drizzle had turned into rain, and Jews huddled under raincoats and hurried up the street to their homes. Costas shrank into his coat as well, envying Mary as she strode along oblivious of the weather.
Across Riyad Pasha and Ramzi Elmasry streets, the neighborhood turned Greek. The buildings were older away from the corniche, many of them a hundred years old, with carved stonework and balconies. A few newer ones marked where bombs had fallen during the Nile war, but there weren’t many of those: Alexandria had only been within the Ethiopian bombers’ range at the end of the war, and it hadn’t been a major target. At turns, the jumble opened to admit a small park or a domed church; all around were importers’ shops with Greek signs and the smell of cooking from tavernas.
It was one of those that Mary entered, finding a table by the window as she shook off the rain. A waiter brought them bread and a plate of lamb and dolma, speaking in Arabic when he first saw Mary’s face and switching to Greek after she spoke it to him. Costas ordered ouzo and Mary raki; there was silence for a few minutes as the older woman ate and drank, and then she picked up the conversation as if it had never been interrupted.
“My mother did know Constantine. He was in Cairo most of the time she was growing up, but his heart was here, and he came back whenever he could. He wasn’t a god yet, as you put it, but he wasn’t very close to her: he was the uncle she saw at Christmas and family gatherings. That changed when she married my father. She was nineteen, and he was the only one who’d still talk to her… but he died three years later, and then there was no one at all.”
“That was before you were born?” Costas guessed.
“Yes, I was born during the war. My father was at the front already. He came home to see me a few months later, but of course I don’t remember that, and then he was killed at Malakal on the White Nile. Constantine was dead before the war began, but he did write a poem for me.”
“For you?”
“For my mother’s first child. It was called ‘The Theater of Artaxata.’” She looked toward the rain streaking the window and recited from memory. “Tell them there are Greeks even in Ararat…”
He had read every poem the great Kavafis had written, but those words were unfamiliar to him. “He never published it?”
“Of course not. He wrote it in a letter to my mother, and knowing him, I doubt he even kept a copy…” She trailed off as she saw the light in his eyes. “You want to see it, don’t you? It’s Constantine in me that fascinates you.” She waved away his denial. “I’ve been sought for worse reasons. Meet me at the lake in the Shallalat Gardens tomorrow at noon.”
Costas finished his lamb. Mary was already talking of other things, but he knew he would be there. She hadn’t given him a choice when she’d asked if he were hungry, and he didn’t have one now.
The artificial lake was the Shallalat Gardens’ glory, with islands of palms and a sculpted shoreline that took in part of the ancient wall. It was Friday, and though the Muslims were at prayer, the park was full of Christians and Jews. Minutes passed before Costas, anxious all the while that he might not find Mary, made his way along the shore to where she was.
In daylight, she looked more Armenian, although maybe that was the way she dressed: her hat was red, and the raised panels on her jacket showed Armenian crosses and Persianate knots. The clothing should have looked ridiculous on a woman of her size, but it didn’t: even a near-stranger could see that her personality was strong enough to carry it off.
He thought that she might show him the letter right away, but she didn’t. They walked out of the gardens and onto the Shari al-Horreya, which in daylight was filled with election posters and exhortations to work and study for the advancement of the nation. They passed the museums and posh stores until they were almost back at al-Naby Daniel, but before they got there, Mary turned abruptly north.
Two blocks up a narrow street led them to another sawdust taverna, which seemed little different from the one where they’d eaten the night before until Costas realized that Mary was the only woman inside. He himself preferred women – a drunken night at the university had taught him that he had no inclinations in the other direction – but he needed no explanation of what this place was: the symbols that many of the patrons wore on necklaces, and the way they looked at and touched each other, left no room for doubt.
“Men have met here for a hundred and fifty years,” Mary said, and Costas realized how old the furnishings were. She looked as if she had something more to say, but maintained the mysterious silence to which, Costas’ mother had told him, women were entitled.
“Constantine?” he guessed.
She nodded. “The song I sang the night I told you to go to hell – 1901 – was about this place. It’s the one place of his that nobody made into a museum.”
In spite of himself, Costas laughed, and when he looked down, he saw that Mary had slid an envelope across the table.
He opened it as his companion ordered zibib – strong, illegally distilled arak – for both of them. The wrapper was brittle and yellowed with age; it bore a stamp with Riyad Pasha’s face and an address in Greek. In those days, the letter-carriers at the Shatby post office would have known how to read it. They probably still could: even today, some people lived their whole lives in Shatby and never learned any other language.
Inside was a letter in the hand that Costas had come to recognize as the poet Kavafis’, and without conscious thought, he began reading out loud:
At Artashat the statues are of strange gods
But sculpted in the Greek style, and athletes
Run naked and bronzed under the mountains, a proud people
Who have learned much from their teachers…
All at once he imagined himself in Constantine’s place, and lost the thread of his reading as he tried to pick up that of the poet’s life. He imagined the elder Kavafis in this taverna on his day off from his government job, or on a visit from Cairo later when his fascination had extended to things Egyptian as well as Greek. In this place he was surrounded by invitations to pleasure but knew he must keep them secret. Here was a sanctuary, but outside, he could only return to silent longing…
When Costas looked up, he saw Mary nodding her head slowly. “He was lonely much of his life,” she said. “That’s what drew him to me, more than anything. They ask me why I’d sing about a man who loves another man, but when I first sang about Constantine’s love affairs, I was singing about my own loneliness. Later, the first time I was married, I put it aside for a while, but his poetry was too deep in my soul by then.”
Costas folded the letter without finishing its contents, and handed it back to her. “Maybe it’s better if this stays unpublished,” he said. “It was private, and it should be private.” There was a silence, and suddenly, with diffident voice, he said, “I’d like to bring more of the family to meet you. Greeks marry Armenians all the time now – even Muslims and Jews. After all this time, you should come back to us…” He stopped short, frightened of his own daring.
Mary, amused, noticed the caution in his voice. “Did you think I’d tell you to go to hell again?” she said. “Maybe yesterday I would have. Now… if they come, I’ll meet them, although meeting here might be a bad idea.”
He laughed, as much at the release from tension as at the joke. “No, the Arsinoe, by the western harbor.”
“At noon,” she said, and rose from her chair. Costas watched until the closing door obscured all trace of her.
Saturday was sunny and unseasonably warm, and Mary took her time walking from her home to the harbor. It was a quarter past noon by the time she got to the Arsinoe. But late as she was, there were only three people waiting for her. Costas was one; beside him was a woman with Jewish features and a swastika charm she’d brought back from India; on the other side was a young man with the face of a hundred generations of fellahin. Neither of them looked like family.
“No one came,” she said.
“They send their regrets, but they all have other appointments,” Costas answered. He believed that no more than she did.
“I could have told you. They might forgive marrying an Armenian, but not an insult to the family. That’s what my mother’s marriage was, and when they tried to forbid her, she made that very plain. They’ll never come.”
“But Naomi and Adly are here,” Costas said quickly. Then, slower, “Naomi and I… are going to marry.”
The trace of a smile crossed Mary’s face. “I hope it won’t cost either of you your family.”
“No, this is another day.” All the same, the silence lengthened.
“I’ve played at the Metropolitan too,” Naomi broke in.
“You have?”
“I play the flute. I backed Yasser Eid there a few times. These days I’m with the city orchestra – the one the Hellenic community started.”
“I’m a medical intern,” said Adly, “at the Greek hospital.”
Now Mary’s smile was more than a trace. “There are Greeks in stranger places than Ararat, are there?”
“Or stranger people have invaded Greece.” Adly waved to a table. “Is it time to eat?”
“No. I don’t think I’m hungry. Let’s go out to the harbor. It’s not the Metropolitan, but I can still sing.”
She gave them no time to demur, but swept out onto the Shari al-Bahariya toward the waterfront and the palace at Ras el-Tin. There was a raised platform near a jetty that had once held a statue, and Mary climbed onto it and stood facing the water. “I am Kavafis’ child,” she said, “and we will all meet again.”
She signaled to Naomi to accompany her, and joined in at the second measure. It took Costas only a second to recognize the words: they were Constantine’s, of course, and they were from a poem called “The Sixth or Seventh Century.”
She will be lost from Hellenism inexorably,
But still holds as much as she can.
Is it any wonder that we,
Who brought back the Greek language to this land
Look on that age with such longing?
